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SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

nasa.gov

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Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#551

Post by davidkamMN »

dianastamm wrote: post #501
ChuckMcM wrote: post #86

It is hard to convey how "sustainable" this feels to me. For the first time, humans have gone into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture. All of the NASA missions prior to this have an ambience of "uneconomical but useful". Even the shuttle, which was supposed to be this cost effective space truck, turned out to be not even close. And the last thing I'm feeling is the a…

I cringed when I saw the Tesla car though. Kinda cheapened the whole thing for me

me too

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#552

Post by cgriswald »

runarberg wrote: post #315
TeMPOraL wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point. Hell, I'd argue that half the interest in spaceflight (except those of people seeing it all through the lens of an Excel sheet) is because of the idea of sending people up there. That alone makes an occasional manned mission worth it, just to keep the general interest alive.

It is not the 1910s any more. We don’t risk other peoples lives on exploration. Heroic though it might seem, it is ultimately foolish. We are already exploring the solar system with machines. And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore.

People are risking their lives exploring dangerous places on Earth every single day, not least of which, the ocean. They're also risking their lives for much less.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#553

Post by amluto »

babesh wrote: post #503
barbegal wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s blindingly obvious that spaceflight makes sense to invest in. The issue is that the level of investment is large and the time horizon before a return is long. Sometimes government takes that role. Are you invested in spaceflight then? I don't see it being very obvious at all. Yes, some precious metals can be recovered in large quantities but they aren't intrinsically valuable. These materials are used in thing…

You can invest in SpaceX indirectly and directly. You have SpaceX indirectly through some mutual funds and actually through Google since Google’s VC arm invested in SpaceX. I have a tiny bit in those two via a mutual fund and Google. The problem is both have SpaceX as a very small percentage of their portfolio. There is also Virgin Galactic but I don’t have that. One material Robert Zubrin is interested in is a rare…

Do you perhaps mean Helium-3? The only interesting rare form of Hydrogen is Tritium, and Tritium is rather nasty stuff.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#554

Post by rkagerer »

jm4 wrote: post #402
tenpies wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Tesla approach, form > function.

BS. Do you think for a second some Tesla engineer or Elon Musk himself could design the most important control panel on a spaceship to look pretty without the support of the people who have to use it? If the astronauts or NASA engineers weren’t ok with it, it wouldn’t be there.

Reading between the lines, I have a hunch the astronauts have mixed feelings about it ("this is certainly different") but ultimately accept it as adequate for the job. You are correct there were a lot of iterations involving the engineers and the pilots to arrive at the final result.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#555

Post by cortesoft »

runarberg wrote: post #539
akiselev wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand the challenges. Sending humans up with semi-automated machines would actually be a lot easier than fully automated machines. The human race's entire experience so far has been with machines in 1g. We have almost zero experience making self repairing factories in any gravity. We have zero experience mining in low or zero gravity. It might take several generations of engineers and miners in space t…

The problems you list seem to apply to both fully and semi automatic machines. E.g. wouldn’t human operated mining equipment need just as much lubrication as pre-programmed ones? We never explored the surface of Mars, or landed on an asteroid before we had our machines do it, but we managed it anyway with the human operators still on Earth.

I think the difference is that humans can fix problems and adapt to changing conditions a lot better than machines currently.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#556

Post by cgriswald »

krapp wrote: post #479
scarygliders wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exploration is timeless. "Let's see what's out there!" It's human nature.

We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes. We're not going to find jungles on Venus or something like that. We're not going to meet the Vulcans.

> We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes.

The entire field of astrobiology is a big giant question mark despite our telescopes and probes. If we'd have sent humans to Mars instead of probes, we'd either have proof of past or present life, or we'd have very convincing evidence that it doesn't or never did exist. And we'd have had that relatively quickly. Here, decades later, we know a lot more, but we don't have this one basic fact.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#557

Post by Gollapalli »

nutjob2 wrote: post #393
lazyjones wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope we can move away from the "elon sucks" v.s. "elon is a genius" dichotomy and into a culture of acknowledging accomplishment while insisting claims in other areas be fully justified. Until then, I'll happily consider Elon's or even John Carmack's opinion over those of Elon's numerous, noisy but otherwise uninteresting critics on the Internet and elsewhere.

How much weight should I give the opinion of someone who calls someone who disagrees with him "the pedo guy"? It's a serious question. Elon may run some successful companies, but beyond that his credibility has taken a beating on any number of fronts. How much credit should Elon get for heading companies full of other people who do the actual work? Could another leader do a better job, given Elons unsteady behaviour?

Well, you can try. See if you can build something to compete. And if you can't, well, then we know who the better man is.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#558

Post by mumblemumble »

wongarsu wrote: post #511
sandworm101 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture. If we are talking pure commercial travel, it is a vehicle without a destination. The ISS is definitely not a commercial project. There are lots of reasons for the ISS to exist, and they have changed over time, but it has never been a money-making venture. While the dragons certainly do come in under budget, they are a more…

On the ISS you can produce higher quality optical fiber than on earth [1]. A demonstration fabrication unit is already on the ISS, and NASA has recently published prices for using the ISS for commercial tasks such as this. I suspect many other manufacturing methods can also benefit from zero gravity, and as launch costs drop more of these will be explored. 1: https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-…

It's interesting to think about that from the other side, too. Just delivering the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg (assuming rock bottom SpaceX prices). Based on some loose googling, I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable. It looks like a typical 100m fiber optic patch cable retails for about $60.

So, there's clearly a lot of value to somebody for fiber optic cable with even lower signal loss.

That really drives home to me that, even though information technology is just my boring day job and it's still space travel that gets me as excited as it did when I was a kid, it's still true that the space age is over and we're definitely living in the information age.

Re: SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit

#560

Post by penagwin »

JshWright wrote: post #358
modeless wrote: post #329

Perhaps of interest to HN, the cockpit displays seen in the videos are HTML pages rendered in Chromium. https://twitter.com/alteredq/status/1266853705632145409?s=19 SpaceX recently released a browser game where you use the real flight UI to dock with the ISS: https://iss-sim.spacex.com/

So you're saying even in space we can't escape Electron?

Well, we can't escape chromium (maybe technically just a subsection of it?)
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